Sysadmin Todo List

General Info

This is an unordered set of tasks. Detailed information on any of the tasks typically goes in related topics' pages, although usually not until the task has been filed under Completed.

Important

• From roentgen's logwatch, Wed Jul 11 04:02:19 2007:

 --------------------- Kernel Begin ------------------------ 

 
 WARNING:  Kernel Errors Present
    10.10.88.111 sent an invalid ICMP type 3, code 3 error to a broadcast:  ...:  1473 Time(s)
 
 ---------------------- Kernel End ------------------------- 

That's ICMP for destination unreachable, port unreachable [1]. Related to the samba stuff hopefully?

• That guy's computer has a BIOS checksum error. Flashing the BIOS to the newest version succeeds, but doesn't fix the problem. No obvious mobo damage either. What happen? Who was that guy, anyhow? The machine is gluon, according to him.
• I wonder if we can go to the demerrit remains and get some drop ceiling panels or similar sound-absorbing material and put it in the server room.... The hum isn't unbearable, but I'm sick of saying "what?" all the time.
• We need exclude filters on the backups. In consolidating the last amanda-style disk, we've had the zip process running verbosely, and just so happened to see a number of obviously large files, like "Matrix Disc 1.mpg" or dvd VOB files. So it became a race to run through the folder being zipped, deleting the movies, music collections, and seasons of TV shows before the zipper got to them. rsync has some exclusion options. However we need to plan and execute extensive tests before modifying the production backup program.
• See if we can implement some sort of NFS user access. NPG_backup_on_Lentil. I've set up both filters and read-only snapshot access to backups at home. Uses what essentially amounts to a bash script version of the fancy perl thing we use now, only far less sophisticated. However, the filtering and user access uses a standard rsync exclude file (syntax in man page) and the user access is fairly obvious NFS read-only hosting.
• Improve documentation of mail software, specifically SpamAssassin, Cyrus, etc.
• Resize partitions on symanzik, bohr, tomato, roentgen, and other machines as necessary so that root has at least a gig of unused space. Can't do roentgen. Has a weird layout, don't want to mess anything up.

• Learn how to use cacti on okra. Seems like a nice tool, mostly set up for us already. Find out why lentil and okra (and tomato?) aren't being read by cacti. Could be related to the warnings that repeat in okra:/var/www/cacti/log/cacti.log. Not related to the warnings; those are for other machines that are otherwise being monitored
• Learn how to set up evolution fully so we can support users. Need LDAP address book. What schema does our LDAP setup suport? Evolution uses "evolutionPerson", apparently it doesn't work without using that schema for describing people. Schemas can be combined: [2]" Typing the name of someone evolution is aware of (that is, someone you've been in communication with before) allows address book like features. Close, but not quite what we're looking for.
• Figure out what to do about the mass Samba login attempts. Since Maurik turned it off, does that mean that we don't really use it for anything important?

Ongoing

• Maintain the Documentation of all systems!
  • Main function
  • Hardware
  • OS
  • Network
• Check e-mails to root every morning
• Clean up 202
  • Figure out what's worth keeping
  • Figure out what doesn't belong here
• Take a look at spamassassin - Improve Performance of this if possible.
• Test unknown equipment:
  • UPS
• Printer in 323 is not hooked up to a dead network port. Actually managed to ping it. One person reportedly got it to print, nobody else has, and that user has been unable ever since. Is this printer dead? We need to find out.
• Look into making a centralized interface to monitor/maintain all the machines at once. Along the same lines: Continue homogenizing the configurations of the machines.
• Figure out why jalapeno doesn't have 3dm sofware running. If we find that there's no good reason, maybe we should install it?
• Certain settings are the similar or identical for all machines. It would be beneficial to write a program to do remote configuration. This would also simplify the process of adding/upgrading machines.
• Update Tomato to RHEL5 and check all services einstein currently provides. Then switch einstein <-> tomato, and then upgrade what was originally einstein. Look into making an einstein, tomato failsafe setup. A good preliminary step would be to find all of the custom scripts on einstein. If they don't have "npg" in their filenames already, it should be added if possible, so that they can all be easily located. Maybe something other than just "npg", because there seems to be a lot of cruft with that label.
• Matt's learning a bit of Perl so we can figure out exactly how the backup works, as well as create more programs in the future, specifically thinking of monitoring. Look into the CPAN modules under Net::, etc. I just found out that it's actually very easy to use ssh to log onto a machine and execute a command rather than a login shell: ssh who@a.b.c cmd. For example, I made a bash function called "whoson" that tells me who's on the machine that I pass to it:whoson roentgen will prompt me for my password, then log on, run w, and display the output.

Waiting

• Steve's pay. Supposedly going to be remedied in the next paycheck.
• Printer queue for Copier: Konica Minolta Bizhub 750. IP=pita.unh.edu Seems like we need info from the Konica guy to get it set up on Red Hat and OS X. The installation documentation for the driver doesn't mention things like the passcode, because those are machine-specific. Katie says that if he doesn't come on Monday, she'll make an inquiry. Mac OS X now working, IT guy should be here week of June 26th Did he ever come?
• Figure out what network devices on tomato are doing what Guess we're waiting for Aaron on this one. He needs to do something soon, because while I'm sure most of these extra devices aren't important to NPG, Xemed and the Paulis probably use them somehow, and we need to know what the deal is before installing RHEL5.
• Eventually one day come up with a plan to deal with pauli2's kernel issue Waiting on heisenberg to let us know about the setup of these machines before reinstalling.

Completed

• * Test LDAP authentication on farm and general machines. We should create a number of users, each with different group settings, in order to narrow down what groups are required to access what. Seems less error-prone than using one user and modifying the settings over and over. See the LDAP doc, write answers there. Made a user named "Joe Delete" that is only in his own group, and he can log into einstein, okra, lentil, tomato, gourd, ennui, and blackbody.
• Finally completed backup consolidation! No more amanda backups are left. Lentil presently has npg-daily-28 in use, 29 ready, the 500gb waiting until the jalapeno problems subside (in case we need to rebuild jalapeno), and an empty slot.
• The Log Level for nmbd on einstein was set to 7. WOA, that is a lot of junk only useful for expert debugging. Please, please, pretty please, don't leave log levels so high and then leave. How do you even set log levels?
• Add a "flavicon" to some areas of web, so that we log fewer errors, for one.
• The snmpd deamon on einstein was very verbose, generating 600 messages per hour, all access from Okra. I changed the default options in /etc/sysconfig/snmpd.options from # OPTIONS="-Lsd -Lf /dev/null -p /var/un/snmpd.pid -a" to OPTIONS="-LS 0-4 d -Lf /dev/null -p /var/run/snmpd.pid -a". Now snmpd is QUIET! We could consider a slight more verbose? (This was discovered with splunk.)
• SPLUNK is now set up on Jalapeno. It is combing the logs of einstein and roentgen and its own logs. See Splunk.
• Checked if the backups are actually happening and working - they are.
• Renewed XML books for Amrita. They're due at the end of the month.
• Fixed the amandabackup.sh script for consolidating amanda-style backups.
• Investigate the change in ennui's host key Almost certainly caused by one of the updates. Just remembered that I was using ennui for a few minutes and I saw the "updates ready!" icon in the corner and habitually clicked it. Darn ubuntu habits. Doesn't explain WHY it changed, only how. It probably wasn't an individual update, but almost certainly was the transition from Fedora 5 to 7. ennui isn't a very popular machine to SSH into, so the change probably just went unnoticed for the two-or-so weeks since the upgrade. I had early thought that it couldn't have been the OS change, since it had been awhile since the change, but upon further thought, it makes perfect sense.
• Look into getting computers to pull scheduled updates from rhn when they check in. See updates through RHN
• Look into monitoring RAID, disk usage, etc. SMARTD, etc.
• Removed Aaron from "who should get root's mail?" part of einstein's /etc/aliases file. Now he won't get einstein's email all the time. Replaced him with "root@einstein.unh.edu", since both of us check that now.
• Added Matt and Steve to the ACL for the backups shared mail folder. It was pretty simple with cyradm.
• Karpiusp remembered his password, no change necessary.
• Need to get onto the "backups" shared folder, as well as be added as members to the lists. "backups" wasn't even a mailing list, according to the Mailman interface. Added Steve and Matt to the CC list for /etc/cron.daily/rsync_backup's mail command. If the message gets sent to us, then we'll know something's wrong with the list. If we don't get it, then the problem is probably in the script. E-mails were received, so there's something up with the mailing list. Yup. Checking the mailing list archives shows no messages on the list. Figured out how to do shared folders with cyrusadm.
• Nobody is currently reading the mail that is send to "root". Einstein had 3000+ unread messages. I deleted almost all. There are some useful messages that are send to root with diagnostics in them, we should find a solution for this. Temporarily, both Matt and Steve have email clients set up to access root's account. The largest chunk of the e-mails concern updating ClamAV. Maybe we should just do that? Doing this caused some major mail problems. It's a punishment for 1) Typing a command in the wrong terminal, 2) Not thoroughly understanding the configuration and importance of a component before updating it, and 3) Not restarting the program after updating it
• Updated SpamAssassin and ran sa-update to get new rules. The SA documentation seems to indicate that having procmail send mail is the typical scenario. However, procmail isn't mentioned in the appropriate Postfix configuration file[3]. procmail and postfix are installed, though. Do we have a special mail setup? It seems like postfix is what does it. File this confusion under "improve mail chain documentation" rather than clutter up the list
• okra was the only machine that jdelete could log into, that also had restrictions in it's etc/security/access.conf, so I commented out the old setting, then copied the content of another machine's file to okra's.

Previous Months Completed

June 2007